At the end of 1997, hide took a break in the studio from working on his soon-to-be-released single “ROCKET DIVE,” the first under the new recording moniker hide with Spread Beaver, which finally credited the band he had been touring with since his solo debut in 1993, to chat about the busy year ahead of him, including two new albums and a national tour.*
“I just finished a meeting with the staff about what to do next year. I can’t tell you any more, but I think I’ll be busy next year. I have full schedules from January to December. Next year, I’ll release a single [“ROCKET DIVE”] that I’m making now. As I said in the magazine interview, I formed another new band [Zilch] based in L.A. I’ll also release the band’s album and perform live concerts. And after the third solo album, with this song “ROCKET DIVE,” comes out next spring, it will be early summer. What will be the schedule from early summer to the end of the year? I’m going on a six-month tour.”
Everything proceeded roughly as hide outlined, beginning with the release of “ROCKET DIVE” on January 28, 1998. Following the single’s release, hide flew to Los Angeles to film the music video for the follow-up, “PINK SPIDER,” and to finish working on his third solo album, which would come to be called Ja,Zoo. Much of the making of the album and its music videos, as well as the funeral ceremony, footage and interviews recorded around L.A. (including Tower Records, which closed in 2006, and Jerry’s Famous Deli, which closed late last year due to the pandemic) and at Sunset Sound Studio on April 2, as well as extensive interviews and footage of his final performances pre-recorded for television on May 1, was filmed and officially documented in the video releases hIS iNVINCIBLE dELUGE eVIDENCE (1998) and hide A STORY 1998 hide LAST WORKS~121 Nichi no Kiseki (1999).
But today we know that less than half of his plans came to fruition. On the morning of May 2, 1998, hide’s brother Hiroshi Matsumoto dropped hide off at home after a night of celebrating at a wrap-up party for the television recordings. While heavily intoxicated, hide accidentally self-asphyxiated while attempting to perform a routine muscle-relaxation technique for the particular neck and shoulder strain that develops from frequent guitar playing.** It was a tragedy the likes for which the Japanese music world was unprepared.
Since the footage of his last months and days alive were released to the public, little of quality worth has been released from those in charge of preserving hide’s memory and life work. Over the last two decades, in addition to numerous plush toys, plastic key chains, and figurines, we’ve gotten a number of tribute albums, compilation albums largely comprised of the same handful of songs, and a few demo tracks, re-recorded, re-mixed, and in the case of 2014’s “Co GAL,” a single that recreated hide’s voice using Vocaloid technology, a popular bit of 21st century technology that ends up sounding as uncanny valley as predicted.
Finally, in 2015, on what would have been hide’s 50th birthday, we got the documentary hide 50th anniversary FILM “JUNK STORY.” The film is notable for telling hide’s life story through interviews, photos, and behind-the-scene clips. The interviews are particularly telling, and largely include hide’s brother (who was something of hide’s personal assistant/chauffeur), former band members, and other staff, including stylists and photographers. Sadly, the film chooses to largely skip over hide’s time in X Japan after the initial anecdote of his joining the group. (I assume this is because the producers didn’t want to conflict with a separate documentary about the band, We Are X, released one year later, and whose production, I believe, was already underway, but hide’s story here suffers for the omission, as it is hard to understand the impact the group and its disbandment had on him later without the details.)
One bit of ominous, and somewhat tone-deaf, foreshadowing occurs early on in the film, when various friends provide sketches concerning hide’s drinking, which hide himself referred to as nearly uncontrollable, (“Once I start drinking, I drink a lot”), including his out-of-character and often violent behavior when under the influence. Here is one story related by former Spread Beaver-member I.N.A, a key figure in the documentary as one of hide’s closest colleagues and musical collaborators:
“I didn’t go out of the room because hide seemed to be completely drunk. I looked out through the door view and he was rioting. He suddenly picked up a fire extinguisher and hit the door of my room. Bang! Bang! I was really scared. Eventually the hinge was broken. So I blocked the door from the inside. After a while, he went back to his room. This is what I heard later, but they said that hide threw many things at the window.”
He was also described as going on “rampages” and for expressing guilt and remorse the following day, often having blacked out and been unable to remember anything, let alone what exactly he was apologizing for. It’s a chilling moment in the film, as stories are told with smirks and resigned chuckles, the sort of words couched in the somewhat sheepish, but entirely mischievous winks steeped in culturally-sanctioned substance abuse. Not that any one individual is to blame, but it gives room for pause to consider what hide’s life could have looked like if peer-approved binge-drinking has been less a part of his life to the point of serious bodily injury that landed him in the hospital and “comical” odes like 1994’s “D.O.D. (Drink Or Die).” In this light, hide’s death becomes a prolonged tragedy with multiple levels that spanned a longer time frame than the wee hours of May 2.
As any good documentary, hide’s offers a handful of new questions and grist for the thought-mill, while also answering some of the most enduring: how hide’s life and art touched the lives of so many, from friends and family, to fans and staff members, to the important work each one has done to preserve his memory and contribution to Japanese music and culture, and how seemingly random and unfair tragedies ripple throughout time and space. It’s hard not to speculate upon whether or not hide’s English-language band would have made any significant impact in the U.S., or if it would have bombed as spectacularly as every other American-crossover; if he would have grown as an artist and released better material as the years went on, or would have lost his musical touch; if he would have remained as respected and beloved a figure with the same opportunity of additional decades to lose the plot as some of his contemporaries have, or if he would have faded, a cultural icon and dinosaur of the 1990s, subsumed by a wave of indie-rock, neo-visual kei, and idol-pop too big to surf.
May 2, 2021 marks the 23rd anniversary of his death, a number just as uneven, odd, and idiosyncratic as the event it marks. It’s an anniversary shadowed again by the pandemic that continues to rage globally. Still there’s tentative hope around the corner as vaccines have begun their slow, and uneven rollout. And 2021 will also mark a very important anniversary, one that we don’t have to spend asking questions and wringing our hands over, as it celebrates the 25th anniversary of hide’s biggest, most ambitious, and critically-lauded album, 1996’s PSYENCE. Let’s treat ourselves when we get to it.
I wrote a previous tribute for hide back in 2010, which can be read here.
Notes
*All of the quotes here have been pulled from the subtitles of VisualKei Jrock’s translation of JUNK STORY. They have been edited for grammar when needed. So much thanks goes to them for translating and posting the video.
**I’m sure it appeared before, but the first time I have seen this reason for death officially recognized was in the documentary. When the news first broke, and for a long time after, the official cause of death was always cited as suicide, with the caveat of the relaxation technique treated as important and likely speculation, but not fact. The documentary’s official take on this says it was “sudden accident by doing cervical vertebra traction treatment during drunkenness.”
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